It is important to celebrate the milestones and celebrate the associations growth, which is also a community of practice, a community of shared learning, social experience and situated knowledge. We learn by sharing experiences, reflecting on practice, challenging our biases and blindspots, affirming our shared purposes and transform individual knowledges into a collective knowledge.
The importance is to reflect on our humanness and what we bring to the table as humans with human intelligence. These were some of the words of the presentation by SAASSAP President, Dr Jerome September. My presentation was about 30 years of history.
The ask
Topic: Lessons learned from formative practices: This sub-theme creates space for critical reflection on earlier models, flagship programmes, and formative approaches that shaped the sector, including what succeeded, what failed and why. It aims to extract transferable lessons that can guide future design, resource decisions and practitioner development.
My lens of policy, research and practice.
The historical trajectory of higher education policy and student affairs
Viewed through my trajectory — from a newly arrived South African matriculant in 1996, to UCT undergraduate and residence house-comm member in 1999 and SRC Vice-President in 2000, to Council on Higher Education researcher, to postdoctoral fellow and senior lecturer, to institutional researcher, to HSRC research leader, and, from April 2025, Director of Postgraduate Studies and Researcher Development at UCT — the history of student affairs since the mid-1990s reads as a movement across four overlapping eras which map against :
• democratisation and system design;
• merger, monitoring and student-success institutionalisation;
• decolonial protest and funding crisis; and, most recently,
• wellbeing, digitality, AI, and postgraduate researcher development.
In South Africa, the foundational higher education policy arc over the last 30 years ran from the NEPI and National Commission on Higher Education of 1996 to the Green/White Paper process and the Higher Education Act of 1997, the National Plan for Higher Education in 2001, the merger era, and system consolidation to the new post-2008 transformation agenda, the White Paper for Post-School Education and Training, the massification leading to the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall years of 2015/16 and following, the shift to grant-based support for poor and working-class undergraduates, the COVID-19 digital pivot, the 2023 National Plan for PSET, and the current 2024–2026 concerns with transformation implementation, funding governance, accommodation, wellbeing (gambling) and system reset.
Across that same arc – the policy arc - now student affairs moved from a relatively fragmented “student services” orientation toward a more integrated field; from a practice to a profession; from borrowing and peddling to a reflective, data, research and theory reformed, reflective praxis; one concerned with access and belonging, residence life and learning, health and wellness, disability inclusion and universal access, gender and gender identity, revolving doors and notions of students-at-risk to first-year transition interventions, student politics to student partnerships, crisis response and technology and hybrid provision, the full student lifecycle, life-stage models and postgraduate student affairs.
Of course, this is a very generalized perspective on a changing field and practice that lived itself out at different paces and with different emphases across our diverse higher education landscape. The student body and the campus and learning conditions prevalent in different context is, what determines some of these emphases, as much as institutional champions, student affairs leaders in different contexts, bring, support or impede various changes.
It is also a deeply personal take on this change.
I am also one of Mandela’s children – or a post-apartheid baby – for I came to South Africa as international student in 1995. Through the years, particularly from my late Master’s and doctoral research between 2000 and 2008, my own work started to map unusually closely onto several field-wide shifts.
Early on, my practice and research centred student governance, representation and higher education policy; then broadened into institutional research and realizing the importance of data, data analytics and ‘institutional intelligence’ to understand the increasingly complex institutional terrain and how this is experienced by and impacts students;
African comparative higher education, student engagement and citizenship; then into the professionalisation of student affairs in Africa, new developments like public-private partnerships, and the emergence of ‘entrepreneurial student politics’; then, mirroring the massification of higher education in South Africa so came new analyses of the politics of protest, and the different violences involved in being black on campus, eventually leading to the wellbeing studies after 2015–2016; and now, in my new role, my research focuses on postgraduate support ecosystems, the transition from undergraduate into postgraduate studies, and from postgraduate studies into academic and professional life.
Anticipating this have been work on international comparative student affairs, doctoral education, community engagement, and the importance of data and data analytics in student affairs decision-making, policy and practice; including experimentation with innovative qualitative methods such as photovoice, world café, poetic inquiry and research-as-intervention studies.
International parallels
Internationally, the strongest parallels to developments in South African student affairs were, perhaps, the rise of student engagement and related surveys as a quality indicator through NSSE (or as it is in South Africa – SASSE) in the early to mid 2000s, the persistence/retention turn associated with Vincent Tinto (and ‘discrediting’ of the deficit model), the global codification of student affairs and services through IASAS and the work on the Global Handbook in the 2010s – along with it a gradual move away from the American dominance of the field and practice - including moving beyond the professional competency movement of ACPA/NASPA towards a South African and African engagement with questions of what constitutes the profession. In many ways, South African debates have informed and reflected a global spread of anti-racist and decolonial campus protest especially from 2015 - #RhodesMustFall, #OpenStellenbosch, the Black Student Movement at Rhodes, and #FeesMustFall taking these concerns nationwide and into the national policy realm.
We hardly had come to terms with the implications of the student activism and the shifting concerns on how to deal with the mounts of endebbedness of students and poverty on campus, when Covid hit and required in the early 2020s a pandemic-induced reorganisation of student support. In its wake came the recent reframing of student affairs around wellbeing and digital transformation.
The ‘southernisation’ of student affairs
The parallels between these shifting emphasis in student affairs research, policy and practice matter much because it shows how over the last 30 years the scholarship of student affairs has consistently become “southernised” – we now have a Global South international student-affairs discourse. This is not that African and Global South student affairs is rejecting the Schuh’s, Kuh’s, Tinto’s, Pascarelli and Terrenzini’s and so forth of America, but rather the African higher education context and our scholarly and professional engagement with it in a reflective way is forcing a reckoning with the contextual applicability of these theories in the context of African higher education massification, South African democratic and party politics, the decolonization discourse, resource constraints and related innovations in student affairs to address unmet financial needs of students and uneven institutional capacity.
The long arc of change is not linear. It is better understood as a continuing argument over what the university is for, who belongs here, who pays, who governs, and what student affairs should do in anticipation and in response.
My personal advice
In my case, the deepest continuity has been that the field never really split into separate domains of politics, policy, services and research. In my biography suggests that you experienced student representation first as practice, then theorised it as governance and democratisation,
When, as a postdoc, I was able to start attending conferences across Africa and do research in our neighbouring countries and in East Africa, I became interested in understanding comparatively across Africa what happens.
FeesMustFall forced me to revisit the student politics research and now, inspired and traumatized, through the lenses of violence that students experienced, recounted and recalled, as well as through the new, post-trauma lens of wellbeing, discourse and memory
Now approach it from the institutional interface between postgraduate support, student affairs, research administration and researcher development. That is why the “from your perspective” view is so analytically useful: your career effectively stitches together the major methodological and substantive shifts of the field.
That is my very personal advice to all young, early and mid-career student affairs professionals – work reflectively between practice and theory, document your curiosity, and never stop being being amazed and fresh.
